A year after the devastating earthquake Haiti is still in shambles, and the people revile government and foreign aid organisations equally. The people love one batch of actors, though: the operators.

Haitians were increasingly spread out, moving into the city and overseas. They wanted to stay in touch and transfer money to family back home, and for a largely illiterate and remote population, mail wasn't the answer.

[...]

Instead of waiting for the government, [operator Digicel] built roads to many of its sites and kept its reception towers going with hundreds of generators. [...] All in all, Digicel has poured more than $400 million in Haiti [...]. Phone prices have dropped from $100-plus to just $10, with free minutes on offer. Yet the company is turning out a profit.

[...]

In the aftermath of the earthquake, the cell-phone companies have continued to provide the same level of corporate support, despite losing millions of dollars in equipment. They have provided free minutes for customers to call for help and reach loved ones. They gave out emergency aid in the form of shelter, medicine, food, and water, with Digicel Foundation spending more than $20 million on relief alone. And both companies now work with NGOs to provide cholera education in the form of text messages.

SMS rules. Although I do wonder how a largely illiterate population reads them.
Pity the article doesn’t give any details about the money transfers; I’d like to know more. One thing’s for sure: it won’t be by bloody credit card. One more operator-turned-bank in the making?

Opera will shortly support the mouseenter and mouseleave events. Finally one of the non-Microsoft browser vendors comes to its senses! And it took me only seven years of badgering. Now if Mozilla and WebKit would be kind enough to follow ...
I wonder how these events are going to work on mobile.

Hiring Front-End Engineers. Excellent advice. Especially read point 3: Good front-end engineers list Javascript on their resume, not jQuery. That’s going to become an even more serious problem in years to come.

An LG director speaks out about Windows Phone 7 and Android. While admitting that Windows Phone 7 is not (yet) the consumer success LG has hoped for, he reiterates that LG has no plans to discontinue the OS. LG is looking for a balance in operating systems; ostensibly aimed at the consumer market, but in fact meant to ensure that no OS vendor will hold the whip hand.
He also says

There is a need and demand from the operators saying there is too much ‘Android’ in the portfolio. In that sense LG always tries to balance our portfolio, and that’s not just in sense of hardware but OSes as well.

Hardware vendors have a choice nowadays, and LG, for one, is determined to keep that choice and balance off Microsoft against Google.

Last week I reported that Amazon is going to set up an Android app store, which made me doubt their sanity. This week it turns out they are in fact stark raving mad: Amazon will have the final say on the app prices; something even Apple hasn’t done.
Amazon Flop Store.

Luke Wroblewski defines five device classes: TVs, desktop/laptop computers, tablets, smartphones, and feature phones.
I was a bit surprised at the last two; I’d have said mobile devices without subdividing them. Feature phones are going to disappear relatively fast, certainly now that it looks like we’ll get $100 Androids somewhere later this year. Besides, maybe the touchscreen vs. non-touchscreen division is more important.
But otherwise this is a very useful division, and it might help us make more sense of the usage context.

Chris Heilmann explains what large companies are doing wrong when they want to find developers.

CSS variables, nesting, and modules are finally coming.
Incidentally, if all this will be built into WebKit it will be on mobile that these new features will be available first.